Through the advances of technology, today's world has become inundated with information. One continuing technological and societal challenge is finding methods and systems to extract and combine useful data, knowledge, and understanding from a pool of information that is constantly growing in quantity and increasing in granularity.
Even when we narrow our analysis to one domain of interest, e.g. ranking wines, how do we combine all the information indicating preferences within the domain when the information is available from multiples sources and the sources differ in modality? For example, how do we combine multiple lists of preferences, e.g., from different online communities, sales numbers from different stores, etc? How do we combine the information in a manner that will reveal the aspects of that information that are important, valuable, significant to an entity (e.g., a machine, business, customer, end-user, etc.) requesting the results? And how do we enable tuning of the outcome, e.g., at the touch of a button, to target certain characteristics and elevate those characteristics to the forefront?